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CAMPAIGNS
OF
A NON-COMBATANT,
AND HIS
ROMAUNT ABROAD DURING THE WAR.
BY
GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND.
NEW YORK:
BLELOCK & COMPANY,
19 BEEKMAN STREET,
1866.
Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1866, by
GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern District of New York.
SCRYMGEOUR, WHITCOMB & CO.,
Stereotypers,
15 WATER STREET, BOSTON.
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|Transcriber's note: Inconsistency in hyphenation in this etext is as in|
|the original book. |
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TO
"Miles O'Reilly,"
Who saw the war as vividly as he sang it; and whose aims for the peace
that has ensued, are even nobler than the noble influence he exerted
during the struggle, these chapters of travel are inscribed by his
friend and colleague.
PREFACE.
In the early part of 1863, while I was resident in London,--the first of
the War Correspondents to go abroad,--I wrote, at the request of Mr.
George Smith, publisher of the Cornhill Magazine, a series of chapters
upon the Rebellion, thus introduced:--
"Few wars have been so well chronicled, as that now desolating
America. Its official narratives have been copious; the great
newspapers of the land have been represented in all its campaigns;
private enterprise has classified and illustrated its several
events, and delegates of foreign countries have been allowed to
mingle freely with its soldiery, and to observe and describe its
battles. The pen and the camera have accompanied its bayonets, and
there has not probably been any skirmish, however insignificant,
but a score of zealous scribes have remarked and recorded it.
"I have employed some leisure hours afforded me in Europe, to
detail those parts of the struggle which I witnessed in a civil
capacity. The Sketches which follow are entirely personal, and
dwell less upon routine incidents, plans, and statistics, than upon
those lighter phases of war which fall beneath the dignity of
severe history and are seldom related. I have endeavored to
reproduce not only the adventures, but the impressions of a
novitiate, and I have described not merely the army and its
operations, but the country invaded, and the people who inhabit it.
"The most that I have hoped to do, is so to simplify a campaign
that the reader may realize it as if he had beheld it, travelling
at will, as I did, and with no greater interest than to see how
fields were fought and won."
To those chapters, I have added in this collection, some estimates of
American life in Europe, and some European estimates of American life;
with my ultimate experiences in the War after my return to my own
country. I cannot hope that they will be received with the same favor,
either here or abroad, as that which greeted their original publication.
But no man ought to let the first four years of his majority slip away
unrecorded. I would rather publish a tolerable book now than a possibly
good one hereafter.
CAMPAIGNS OF A NON-COMBATANT,
AND HIS
Romaunt abroad during the War.
CHAPTER 1.
MY IMPRESSMENT.
"Here is a piece of James Franklin's printing press, Mr. Townsend," said
Mr. Pratt to me, at Newport the other day,--"Ben. Franklin wrote for the
paper, and set type upon it. The press was imported from England in
1730, or thereabouts."
He produced a piece of wood, a foot in length, and then laid it away in
its drawer very sacredly.
"I should like to write to that press, Mr. Pratt," I said,--"there would
be no necessity in such a case of getting off six columns for to-night's
mail."
"Well!" said Mr. Pratt, philosophically, "I have a theory that a man
grows up to machinery. As your day so shall your strength be. I believe
you have telegraphed up to a House instrument, haven't you?"
"Mr. Pratt," cried I, with some indignation, "your memory is too good.
This is Newport, and I have come down to see the surf. Pray, do not
remind me of hot hours in a newspaper office, the click of a Morse
dispatch, and work far into the midnight!"
So I left Mr. Pratt, of the Newport _Mercury_, with an ostentation of
affront, and bade James Brady, the boatman, hoist sail and carry me over
to Dumpling Rocks.
On the grassy parapet of the crumbling tower which once served the
purposes of a fort, the transparent water hungering at its base, the
rocks covered with fringe spotting the channel, the ocean on my right
hand lost in its own vastness, and Newport out of mind save when the
town bells rang, or the dip of oars beat in the still swell of
Narragansett,--I lay down, chafing and out of temper, to curse the
only pleasurable labor I had ever undertaken.
To me all places were workshops: the seaside, the springs, the summer
mountains, the cataracts, the theatres, the panoramas of islet-fondled
rivers speeding by strange cities. I was condemned to look upon them all
with mercenary eyes, to turn their gladness into torpid prose, and speak
their praises in turgid columns. Never nepenthe, never _abandonne_,
always wide-awake, and watching for saliences, I had gone abroad like a
falcon, and roamed at home like a hungry jackal. Six fingers on my hand,
one long and pointed, and ever dropping gall; the ineradicable stain
upon my thumb; the widest of my circuits, with all my adventure, a
paltry sheet of foolscap; and the world in which I dwelt, no place for
thought, or dreaminess, or love-making,--only the fierce, fast, flippant
existence of news!
And with this inward execration, I lay on Dumpling Rocks, looking to
sea, and recalled the first fond hours of my newspaper life.
To be a subject of old Hoe, the most voracious of men, I gave up the
choice of three sage professions, and the sweet alternative of idling
husbandry.
The day I graduated saw me an _attache_ of the Philadelphia _Chameleon_.
I was to receive three dollars a week and be the heir to lordly
prospects. In the long course of persevering years I might sit in the
cushions of the night-editor, or speak of the striplings around me as
"_my_ reporters."
"There is nothing which you cannot attain," said Mr. Axiom, my
employer,--"think of the influence you exercise!--more than a clergyman;
Horace Greeley was an editor; so was George D. Prentice; the first has
just been defeated for Congress; the last lectured last night and got
fifty dollars for it."
Hereat I was greatly encouraged, and proposed to write a leader for next
day's paper upon the evils of the Fire Department.
"Dear me," said Mr. Axiom, "you would ruin our circulation at a wink;
what would become of our ball column? in case of a fire in the building
we couldn't get a hose to play on it. Oh! no, Alfred, writing leaders is
hard and dangerous; I want you first to learn the use of a beautiful
pair of scissors."
I looked blank and chopfallen.
"No man can write a good hand or a good style," he said, "without
experience with scissors. They give your palm flexibility and that is
soon imparted to the mind. But perfection is attained by an alternate
use of the scissors and the pen; if a little paste be prescribed at the
same time, cohesion and steadfastness is imparted to the man."
His reasoning was incontrovertible; but I damned his conclusions.
So, I spent one month in slashing several hundred exchanges a day, and
paragraphing all the items. These reappeared in a column called "THE
LATEST INFORMATION," and when I found them copied into another journal,
a flush of satisfaction rose to my face.
The editor of the _Chameleon_ was an old journalist, whose face was a
sealed book of Confucius, and who talked to me, patronizingly, now and
then, like the Delphic Oracle. His name was Watch, and he wore a
prodigious pearl in his shirt-bosom. He crept up to the editorial room
at nine o'clock every night, and dashed off an hour's worth of
glittering generalities, at the end of which time two or three
gentlemen, blooming at the nose, and with cheeks resembling a map drawn
in red ink, sounded the pipe below stairs, and Mr. Watch said--
"Mr. Townsend, I look to you to be on hand to-night; I am called away by
the Water-Gas Company."
Then, with enthusiasm up to blood-heat, aroused by this mark of
confidence, I used to set to, and scissor and write till three o'clock,
while Mr. Watch talked water-gas over brandy and water, and drew his
thirty dollars punctually on Saturdays.
So it happened that my news paragraphs, sometimes pointedly turned into
a reflection, crept into the editorial columns, when water-gas was
lively. Venturing more and more, the clipper finally indited a leader;
and Mr. Watch, whose nose water-gas was reddening, applauded me, and
told me in his sublime way, that, as a special favor, I might write all
the leaders the next night. Mr. Watch was seen no more in the sanctum
for a week, and my three dollars carried on the concern.
When he returned, he generously gave me a dollar, and said that he had
spoken of me to the Water-Gas Company as a capital secretary. Then he
wrote me a pass for the Arch Street Theatre, and told me, benevolently,
to go off and rest that night.
For a month or more the responsibility of the _Chameleon_ devolved
almost entirely upon me. Child that I was, knowing no world but my own
vanity, and pleased with those who fed its sensitive love of approbation
rather than with the just and reticent, I harbored no distrust till one
day when Axiom visited the office, and I was drawing my three dollars
from the treasurer, I heard Mr. Watch exclaim, within the publisher's
room--
"Did you read my article on the Homestead Bill?"
"Yes," answered Axiom; "it was quite clever; your leaders are more alive
and epigrammatic than they were."
I could stand it no more. I bolted into the office, and cried--
"The article on the Homestead Bill is mine, so is every other article in
to-day's paper. Mr. Watch does not tell the truth; he is ungenerous!"
"What's this, Watch?" said Axiom.
"Alfred," exclaimed Mr. Watch, majestically, "adopts my suggestions very
readily, and is quite industrious. I recommend that we raise his salary
to five dollars a week. That is a large sum for a lad."
That night the manuscript was overhauled in the composing room. Watch's
dereliction was manifest; but not a word was said commendatory of my
labor; it was feared I might take "airs," or covet a further increase of
wages. I only missed Watch's hugh pearl, and heard that he had been
discharged, and was myself taken from the drudgery of the scissors, and
made a reporter.
All this was very recent, yet to me so far remote, that as I recall it
all, I wonder if I am not old, and feel nervously of my hairs. For in
the five intervening years I have ridden at Hoe speed down the groove of
my steel-pen.
The pen is my traction engine; it has gone through worlds of fancy and
reflection, dragging me behind it; and long experience has given it so
great facility, that I have only to fire up, whistle, and fix my
couplings, and away goes my locomotive with no end of cars in train.
Few journalists, beginning at the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere
they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the
early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world
more grotesque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious
illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personae of the world
congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who admit of
all kindly caricature.
I summon from that humming and hurly-burly past, the ancient
proof-reader. He wears a green shade over his eyes and the gas burner is
drawn very low to darken the bald and wrinkled contour of his forehead.
He is severe in judgment and spells rigidly by the Johnsonian standard.
He punctuates by an obdurate and conscientious method, and will have no
italics upon any pretext. He will lend you money, will eat with you,
drink with you, and encourage you; but he will not punctuate with you,
spell with you, nor accept any of your suggestions as to typography or
paragraphing whatsoever. He wears slippers and smokes a primitive clay
pipe; he has everything in its place, and you cannot offend him more
than by looking over any proof except when he is holding it. A chip of
himself is the copyholder at his side,--a meagre, freckled, matter of
fact youth, who reads your tenderest sentences in a rapid monotone, and
is never known to venture any opinion or suggestion whatever. This boy,
I am bound to say, will follow the copy if it be all consonants, and
will accompany it if it flies out of the window.
The office clerk was my bane and admiration. He was presumed by the
verdant patrons of the paper to be its owner and principal editor, its
type-setter, pressman, and carrier. His hair was elaborately curled, and
his ears were perfect racks of long and dandyfied pens; a broad,
shovel-shaped gold pen lay forever opposite his high stool; he had an
arrogant and patronizing address, and was the perpetual cabbager of
editorial perquisites. Books, ball-tickets, season-tickets, pictures,
disappeared in his indiscriminate fist, and he promised notices which he
could not write to no end of applicants. He was to be seen at the
theatre every night, and he was the dashing escort of the proprietor's
wife, who preferred his jaunty coat and highly-polished boots to the
less elaborate wardrobe of us writers. That this noble and fashionable
creature could descend to writing wrappers, and to waiting his turn with
a bank-book in the long train of a sordid teller, passed all speculation
and astonishment. He made a sorry fag of the office boy, and advised us
every day to beware of cutting the files, as if that were the one vice
of authors. To him we stole, with humiliated faces, and begged a
trifling advance of salary. He sternly requested us not to encroach
behind the counter--his own indisputable domain--but sometimes asked us
to watch the office while he drank with a theatrical agent at the
nearest bar. He was an inveterate gossip, and endowed with a damnable
love of slipshod argument; the only oral censor upon our compositions,
he hailed us with all the complaints made at his solicitation by
irascible subscribers, and stood in awe of the cashier only, who
frequently, to our delight and surprise, combed him over, and drove him
to us for sympathy.
The foreman was still our power behind the throne; he left out our copy
on mechanical grounds, and put it in for our modesty and sophistry. In
his broad, hot room, all flaring with gas, he stood at a flat stone like
a surgeon, and took forms to pieces and dissected huge columns of
pregnant metal, and paid off the hands with fabulous amounts of
uncurrent bank bills. His wife and he went thrice a year on excursions
to the sea-side, and he was forever borrowing a dollar from somebody to
treat the lender and himself.
The ship-news man could be seen towards the small-hours, writing his
highly imaginative department, which showed how the Sally Ann, Master
Todd, arrived leaky in Bombay harbor; and there were stacks of newsboys
asleep on the boilers, fighting in their dreams for the possession of a
fragment of a many-cornered blanket.
These, like myself, went into the halcyon land of Nod to the music of a
crashing press, and swarmed about it at the dawn like so many gad flies
about an ox, to carry into the awakening city the rhetoric and the
rubbish I had written.
And still they go, and still the great press toils along, and still am I
its slave and keeper, who sit here by the proud, free sea, and feel like
Sinbad, that to a terrible old man I have sold my youth, my convictions,
my love, my life!